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Political Polling Sites Are in a Race of Their Own

Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, a poll aggregating site, at his home office in Chicago. His site rates pollsters and runs election simulations to predict outcomes.Credit
Beth Rooney for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The 2008 presidential campaign, now almost two years old, may be the most polled election in history, leading to the creation, and the increasing popularity, of Web sites that aggregate and average each day’s wave of new polls so voters do not have to.

RealClearPolitics.com, the most visited of those sites with about 140 million page views in September, reported the results of 36 presidential polls on Monday alone, including 7 national polls and 5 from Virginia.

The sites also compile polls for Senate and House races as the Republicans seek to stop House Democrats from consolidating their 2006 gains and Senate Democrats from capturing a filibuster-proof 60 seats.

“That’s an enormous part of this phenomenon — no one has the time to collect all that information,” said Mark Blumenthal, who started Pollster.com in 2006 with a University of Wisconsin professor, Charles Franklin. Many voters seem to agree. Noah Stern, 24, a supporter of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said he checked RealClearPolitics.com about 10 times a day and another site, FiveThirtyEight.com, a few times as well, mostly because they have all the latest polling data in one place.

“I have this sense of impending dread that the election will tighten,” said Mr. Stern, a Georgetown law student. “I just have to keep checking.”

But as the sites attract more visitors, their founders are also striving to separate themselves from the competition, usually by building up their own methods but also, in a few cases, by trying to tear down the competition.

“My guess is that there’s not room for more than three or four of these sites,” said Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight .com. “The trick is making sure you’re one of the three or four.”

Pollster.com received more than a million page views on each of two days last week, and Mr. Blumenthal said traffic had “been rising at a linear 45-degree angle” for the last month.

Mr. Silver, who first made his name as the designer of a well-regarded method for predicting baseball statistics, said his site received more than one million page views per day, despite having just been unveiled this year.

Still, the traffic at those sites pales in comparison to that at RealClearPolitics.com, the only one of the three that existed in 2004. That site averaged just under seven million page views per day last week, and one of its founders, John McIntyre, said traffic was significantly higher than four years ago.

Pollsters have also noticed the sites, with some saying the more information available, the better. “I think everyone should begin the day at RasmussenReports .com,” Scott Rasmussen said of his polling site. “But when you visit these sites, you do see what else is out there.”

But he and other pollsters have concerns about the statistical methods some sites use to aggregate dozens of polls without sifting the bad from the good.

“Some polls are better than others,” said Frank M. Newport, editor in chief of The Gallup Poll, who said he worried that some sites did not provide enough contextual analysis. And Mr. Rasmussen said that averaging polls to one-tenth of one percentage point, as the sites often do, conveyed a false precision.

But Richard A. Kulka, the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, said he thought aggregation sites could be helpful to voters. “What we’re struggling with is the most reasonable method for combining polls,” Mr. Kulka said. “We as a field need to work on that.”

The sites use a range of statistical sophistication. Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com use regression-based analyses — a method of smoothing data to account for outliers. On the other hand, RealClearPolitics.com uses a simple average of recent polls.

The differences do not always have a profound effect. For example, the three sites listed Mr. Obama’s lead in Colorado at 6.5 percentage points to 6.7 percentage points on Monday afternoon. But at the other extreme, Mr. Obama’s lead in Michigan was as low as 11.5 points at FiveThirtyEight .com and as high as 17 percentage points at RealClearPolitics.com.

With their numbers often similar, the sites seek other distinctions. Pollster.com graphically displays its findings, then allows visitors to manipulate those graphs, filtering polls in or out.

Mr. McIntyre said RealClear Politics.com served as a one-stop shop for harried voters, with news and analysis crossing the political spectrum. “It’s information overload right now,” he said. “We want to be the single place someone can go for all the analysis and polling info they need.”

Mr. Silver, an Obama supporter who started the year posting on the liberal Web site Daily Kos, includes demographics and uses election data going back to 2000, to rate pollsters, giving more credit to those who closely predicted outcomes. His site runs 10,000 simulations of the election, taking into account that the trailing candidate usually gains ground in the closing days and other factors. The model then predicts the winner of a state and the election. (Mr. Obama currently wins 96.7 percent of the time.)

Sam Wang, who runs a site called the Princeton Election Consortium, which receives around 30,000 page views per day, said polls should not be used to predict future results. Mr. Wang said he did not believe the assumptions by Mr. Silver made his forecasts more reliable.

Dick Bennett, at the American Research Group, was even blunter. “He hasn’t been able to predict the future,” Mr. Bennett said. “If he did, he would have been able to predict who’d win in June.”

Mr. Silver has also criticized fellow aggregators, most notably accusing RealClearPolitics.com of rigging its averages to favor Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, and other Republicans this month.

He later backed away from that claim and said the two sites had a friendly rivalry and grudging respect for each other.

Mr. McIntyre denied that his site had conservative leanings.

“We’re running a business,” Mr. McIntyre said. “We have no interest in screwing around with that for partisan purposes.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Polling Sites Are in a Race of Their Own. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe